Our ancestor's 'leaky' membrane answers big questions in biology

All life on Earth came from one common ancestor – a single-celled organism – but what it looked like, how it lived and how it evolved into today's modern cells is a four billion year old mystery being solved by researchers ...

Amoeboid swimming - crawling in a fluid

Researchers from CNRS, Inserm, and Université Joseph Fourier - Grenoble have developed a particularly simple model that reproduces the swimming mechanism of amoebas. They show that, by changing shape, these single cell organisms ...

Microbes welcome protected habitat

A pond in Salzburg has been granted nature conservation status due to its unusually diverse population of ciliates. As the results of an Austrian Science Fund FWF research project show, this small water body is home to an ...

Genes define the interaction of social amoeba and bacteria

Amoeba eat bacteria and other human pathogens, engulfing and destroying them – or being destroyed by them, but how these single-cell organisms distinguish and respond successfully to different bacterial classes has been ...

'Pharmaceutical' approach boosts oil production from algae

Taking an approach similar to that used for discovering new therapeutic drugs, chemists at the University of California, Davis, have found several compounds that can boost oil production by green microscopic algae, a potential ...

Tiny foraminifera in oceans can save islands, study finds

The climate is getting warmer, and sea levels are rising – a threat to island nations. As a group of researchers lead by colleagues from the University of Bonn found out, at the same time, tiny single-cell organisms are ...

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